Stripe bolsters its mobile payments cred with $80M funding round

Braintree’s recent $800 million sale to PayPal(s ebay) has made the normally staid online payments market a hot place to be. One of Braintree’s key competitors Stripe has definitely taking full advantage. Stripe has raised an $80 million Series C round, the company told the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, bringing its total valuation to $1.75 billion.

The new funding comes from Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital and Founders Fund among others, the Journal reported. The startup has been a hot item since it launched in 2011, boasting a half-billion valuation less than a year after launching its payments platform and attracting early interest from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and celebrated angel investor Ron Conway.

Advertisement

Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison

The excitement most likely isn’t centered around online payments, which is a pretty mature market, but in Stripe’s specialization in mobile commerce and new collaborative consumption business models. As more transactions move to smartphones, developers are looking to streamline their apps for those payments, and they’ve found a willing partner in Stripe.

Also, as more complex transaction models emerge that involve multiple buyers, multiple sellers and even multiple payment methods, Stripe and Braintree’s platforms have proved flexible enough to accommodate them. Stripe now counts Foursquare, Shopify, Lyft, Skillshare and thousands of other startups among its customers.

Stripe also revealed in its blog this week that it’s bolstering its international efforts in Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Spain. Companies in those countries were using Stripe as part of a beta program, but now any company in those regions can use the service without an invite. Stripe is already fully launched in the U.K. and Ireland.